He Yi had barely been in the kitchen for long before he hurried back out, one hand braced against the wall.
“…” Help. He truly had not expected it to be meat from that thing.
He Yi crouched beside the drainage channel in the courtyard and tried to make himself vomit up the raw “camel” slices he had swallowed earlier.
After struggling for quite a while without success, he suddenly felt someone pat his shoulder. He Yi turned around and saw Wu Yundi standing beside him. “Can’t get it out?”
“No. I probably chewed it too thoroughly… Ugh, no, just thinking about it…” He Yi’s stomach churned. He dry-heaved several more times before the nausea finally eased, but still nothing came up.
“Don’t rush. Gather everyone who tasted that stuff for me. I’ll go find a physician.”
He Yi almost said “All right,” but after remembering the other man’s status, he changed it to, “Understood.”
Before long, a group of runners arrived and surrounded the manager, waiters, cooks, and other staff of Qingfeng Teahouse.
He Yi helped separate out everyone who had eaten from Wu Yundi’s plate of raw “camel” slices and kept them to one side. Once they realized he was assisting the Patrol Inspector, none of them dared make a fuss and all cooperated obediently.
The physician arrived quickly because there was a clinic not far away. Once the elderly physician came, he had his young assistant roast melon pedicels. Mixed with sour xie water and drunk together, the preparation could induce vomiting.
Elio’s Notes: Gua di (瓜蒂), the dried pedicel or stem end of muskmelon, appears in historical Chinese medicine as an emetic. Historical formulas also pair roasted gua di with sour xie water; xie is an allium vegetable.
Perhaps there was finally something in his stomach to bring up. After He Yi drank it and tried to trigger his gag reflex again, he really did vomit this time.
The others, having no idea what was going on, followed suit and gulped down large bowls of melon-pedicel water. But when He Yi told them they also needed to make themselves gag, no one moved.
“Why do we have to do this…?” someone finally asked, mustering his courage.
Only then did He Yi remember that they had not gone into the kitchen and therefore had no idea what had happened. He put on a troubled expression and said, “As for why you need to bring up what you just ate, I’m afraid I can’t really tell you the reason. All I can say is that the Patrol Inspector is handling the matter. If I tell you and you start making a scene, then His Excellency blames me, I’ll be in serious trouble. But if I say nothing, you won’t agree to induce vomiting. This concerns your health, and if something truly happens to you, my conscience won’t let me rest…”
They were desperately curious, so they immediately promised they would not make a scene.
He Yi lowered his voice. “That wasn’t some rare camel delicacy. It was… rat meat.” When he had followed the Patrol Inspector into the kitchen earlier, there had been no camel meat anywhere. Under the inspector’s questioning, one of the cooks had trembled all over and kept guiltily glancing toward a corner, apparently thinking no one had noticed. The Patrol Inspector searched there and found several rat tails, rat heads, and skeletons inside a basket.
The teahouse staff still refused to say anything, but He Yi could more or less guess what had happened. They probably really could not obtain camels from the Western Regions, so they had used the name to attract wealthy diners and make money from them. They substituted rat meat, likely counting on the fact that there had been no famine in recent years, so very few people had eaten rat. And once it was sliced raw, it was difficult to identify what kind of meat it had originally been.
“Rat meat?!” Those who had never eaten it looked horrified.
“Hah! It’s only rat. People eat it all the time. The ones from the fields are delicious. Ha, and here I thought it was something terrible!” A few people who had eaten rat before were completely unconcerned.
Rat meat could indeed be eaten, but it depended on what kind of rat. People ate bamboo rats and field rats, and if that had been all they were served, He Yi would not have been so disgusted. But what they had eaten were brown rats, the kind that spent all year in filthy, chaotic places and fed not on fruit and roots but on refuse and excrement. Rats like these were also often a source of epidemics.
All He Yi could say was, “You know how filthy some of the alleys out back are. The teahouse people may well have caught rats from places like that and sliced them up raw for people to eat.” And it wasn’t even cooked…
The moment the crowd heard this, they all began retching. Then they scrambled toward the courtyard, fighting for space to make themselves vomit.
By the time they had thrown up until their faces were pale, they had forgotten He Yi’s warning and turned on the teahouse cooks, shouting abuse.
The runners had no choice but to hold the angry customers back. For a time, the teahouse hall was in complete uproar.
Wu Yundi frowned. He looked at the manager, who stood with his head bowed in silence, then at the customers huddled behind the runners and cursing at the top of their lungs, and finally shot He Yi, who stood behind the crowd, a sidelong glance.
Just as Wu Yundi was about to speak and calm everyone down, another group arrived at the entrance, led unexpectedly by the Town Supervisor himself.
“Patrol Inspector, what is going on here? Could there be some misunderstanding?” The Town Supervisor stroked his white beard and raised his voice. The room immediately quieted.
The moment he heard the word “misunderstanding,” Wu Yundi’s expression darkened. He replied, “Town Supervisor, you already know there is some misunderstanding here? Would you care to explain it to me?”
The Town Supervisor smiled but did not answer. Instead, he walked over to Wu Yundi and said quietly, “Making arrests is your office’s duty, but hearing cases is ours. Each office should keep to its own business. You are a sensible man, Patrol Inspector. You understand, don’t you?”
It appeared he had no intention of letting Wu Yundi interfere. Wu Yundi’s brows drew tightly together. He clasped his hands behind his back and said nothing, thinking hard about how to persuade the other man.
He Yi did not understand the twists and turns of officialdom. Standing off to the side, he thought over a few things on his own. He had a vague feeling that what happened today might be connected to the earlier epidemic, so he pulled several customers aside and questioned them.
After asking carefully, he learned that when the town had reopened earlier, many shops had resumed business, but Qingfeng Teahouse had remained closed until today. Two apprentice cooks from the teahouse had contracted the epidemic and died. Short-handed, the teahouse had not reopened until it found new cooks.
There had also been a customer of considerable status who caught the disease. He had survived, but apparently was still bedridden.
He Yi asked, “Did that customer order the raw camel slices?”
“Huh, I didn’t remember at first, but now that you mention it, I think he did! He came from the county seat and carried himself like someone important. The moment he arrived, he specifically ordered that dish. We were sitting at the next table and were green with envy.”
Hearing the strange point He Yi was fixating on, the others could not help drawing their own conclusions and wondering whether there might be a connection. Before long, the hall grew noisy again.
Seeing how stubborn Wu Yundi was, the Town Supervisor finally revealed that Qingfeng Teahouse had someone powerful protecting it, hoping the warning would make him back off. Wu Yundi, however, remained completely unmoved. He neither spoke nor showed his position, and the two sides reached a stalemate.
After thinking it over repeatedly, He Yi still decided to tell the Patrol Inspector what was worrying him. As it happened, the inspector turned away at that moment. Seeing He Yi repeatedly signaling to him with his eyes, Wu Yundi walked over.
“Something wrong? Did you manage to throw it up?”
“Yes. Patrol Inspector, you tasted it too, didn’t you? The physician’s melon-pedicel water really worked. Why don’t you have some as well?”
“I took one taste and spat it right back out. I’m fine.”
He Yi froze for a moment before saying, “Patrol Inspector, there’s something I would like to tell you. I think the earlier epidemic that infected so many people in town may not necessarily have started here, but Qingfeng Teahouse is probably connected to it somehow. It’s worth investigating.” He Yi then told Wu Yundi everything he had just learned from the others.
Wu Yundi’s eyes grew brighter the more he listened. When He Yi finished, he slapped him hard on the shoulder and blurted, “You brat!”
He Yi’s shoulder throbbed from the blow. Slightly speechless, he rubbed it and asked, “Did I say something wrong? I’m only raising a possibility. I didn’t say…”
Before he could finish, the Patrol Inspector gave him an approving smile, then turned and went back to the Town Supervisor.
He Yi did not know what the Patrol Inspector said to the Town Supervisor afterward, but the Town Supervisor actually agreed to let the runners bind the teahouse manager and the others and take them all to the Town Supervisor’s Office.
Whether it was the Town Supervisor’s idea or someone else’s order, those who had eaten the raw “camel” slices were told to stay temporarily on the top floor of Qingfeng Teahouse.
“What? We actually get to stay on the top floor? For five whole days?”
“What kind of good fortune just fell from the sky? I-I ate some too! I want to stay upstairs!”
The customers responded enthusiastically. Whether or not they had truly eaten the rat meat the teahouse had passed off as something better, some even lied because they wanted a free stay.
But He Yi told them that the reason these people, himself included, were being kept in the closed Qingfeng Teahouse for five days was to quarantine those who might have contracted the epidemic.
The people hoping to slip in with the others finally lost their enthusiasm when death entered the equation. The Patrol Inspector, annoyed that they had caused trouble, decided to make an example of them. He had the runners seize the loudest few and give each of them five strokes with the board.
Afterward, a runner escorted He Yi to the top floor of the teahouse. He was not given any choice of room. The moment the runner turned from the stairway, he pushed He Yi into the first room they came to.
The room was small but elegantly furnished. Two rosewood horseshoe-back chairs stood at opposite ends of a small table, on which sat a porcelain vase holding pink-and-white begonias. Apart from that, the only other piece of furniture was a luohan bed. Despite the name, it was really meant only for short rests. A low table stood in the center; after removing it, a person could just barely lie down, but at He Yi’s height he certainly could not stretch out fully. Luohan beds were generally used when receiving guests, not for a full night’s sleep.
He Yi sat down on the luohan bed with his chin propped in one hand. He thought he had already been here quite a while. He wondered whether Xue Ci had managed to obtain his foreign-resident papers and whether he might still be waiting for him.
Just as He Yi was wondering whether he could ask a runner for help, another thought occurred to him. All the runners who had come today were under the Patrol Inspector, and He Jie was also a runner, yet for some reason He Yi had not seen him among those present.
The thought that the runner outside might be one of He Jie’s colleagues made him hesitate a little. Fortunately, he had not been wrestling with the question for long when the Patrol Inspector came to see him.
The Patrol Inspector glanced at the luohan bed and chose to sit in one of the horseshoe-back chairs instead. Then he said, “I’ll be staying in the teahouse these five days too, right next door to you. Things went fairly smoothly this time, thanks to you. I still haven’t asked. You are…?”
“This humble one is He Yi. You’re too kind, Patrol Inspector. I didn’t really do anything.”
“Don’t be modest. I still have things to handle. I’ll come back and talk to you once I’m done. By the way, do you need to let your family know you’re here?”
“Ah, yes. He should be at the Town Supervisor’s Office right now. His name is Xue Ci. If you see him, please tell him I have to stay here for five days and that he should return to the village on his own first. As for the chickens, geese, and fields at home, have him ask Qianli and Auntie Liu for help. Also, could you give him this book for me?” He Yi pulled the Thousand Character Classic from where he had tucked it at the back of his waist and handed it to Wu Yundi.
“I’ll have a runner take care of it. Don’t worry.” The Patrol Inspector glanced at the title of the book and nodded. “Is he your younger brother?”
“Thank you, Patrol Inspector. No, he isn’t my younger brother. He’s family.” He Yi smiled and did not explain further.
The Patrol Inspector did not seem inclined to ask. He struggled to recall He Yi’s long string of instructions, afraid he might forget something. Muttering the list to himself over and over, he pushed open the door, found a runner, and immediately relayed every instruction.